The new platform maze
I own an old, quite customised Thinkpad a21m laptop, which I still use intensively when I’m out of town: with 256 Mb of RAM, a 750 MHz Pentium 3 chip and a 1024x768 screen running off an ATI chip, I can run pretty much all recent GNU/Linux distros around. I also have built a nice living-room warmer based off an Athlon64 X2 3800+ with a big, fat hard disk and more RAM than you can shake a stick at (well, almost). Is there a problem here?
If I tell you that I need to download ten (10) different CD images to install both according to their specificities, maybe you’ll get it.
Of useless nitpickings and burnt CDs
You’ll tell me, why don’t you just download the i586 DVD, or even just an i586 LiveCD with Net install abilities?
Simply because, according to my tests and all other things being equal, if you install a generic i586 kernel on a P3 and compare it to the very same kernel but recompiled for P3, you get a net 10% performance difference. Significant, but hardly worth getting annoyed about it. Right.
However, when you see such a difference between 2 chip generations, what do you get when you compare chips separated by 3 generations—and a complete architecture upgrade from 32 to 64 bits?
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